Motivational Quotes

Criticism

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

- Tynan, Kenneth

Best Quotes about Criticism

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

10.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

13.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

14.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

15.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

16.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

17.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

18.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

19.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

20.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

21.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

22.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

24.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

25.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

26.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

27.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

28.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

29.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

30.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

31.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

32.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

33.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

34.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

35.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

37.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

38.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

39.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

40.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

41.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

42.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

43.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

44.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.